For those who are unfamiliar with Sam Shepard’s masterpiece, True West is the ultimate play about sibling rivalry. Two brothers spend a few nights together after they haven’t seen each other in five years. Austin is a successful screenwriter, married with children, who attended an Ivy League school. He is house-sitting his mother’s home in suburban California while she travels in Alaska. Lee, the older brother, is a rough-around-the-edges drifter and burglar who recently lived for three months alone in the Mojave Desert. In the Distillery Theatre Company’s production of the play, which had a short, three night run at the Irish Arts Center before traveling to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, actors Douglas Taurel and Foster Davis alternate the roles of Austin and Lee. On the night I saw the play, Taurel played Austin and Davis played Lee.

The play explores the brothers’ competitiveness, and is meant to show how each brother’s role defines the other’s, how they are really both the same beneath the surface, and how they depend on one another. The play is also about power. Lee obtains his power by bullying, intimidating, sometimes gambling or stealing. He thinks on his feet, lives moment to moment like a wild animal. Austin’s power comes from his success and money and the status he’s gained through his career and education. At the beginning of the play, Austin is researching and writing a Hollywood script, a period love story that he has been trying to close the deal on for months. He seems to have buried his wild, unrefined nature (if he ever had one). Lee prevents Austin from working by interrupting him with requests and questions, and he leans against the refrigerator as if he owns it. The dynamic between the brothers is clear. Lee can get Austin to do pretty much anything he wants because he knows Austin is frightened to death of him. He even makes a joke about it.

As the play progresses, Lee meets Austin’s producer, Saul (played by John Unruh) and coerces him into playing a round of golf and reading the outline for his own script idea. On the golf course, Lee gambles with Saul and wins the prize: for Saul to produce his movie and for Austin to write the script, a “true western” featuring men riding through the desert, through “tornado country” to get to the Mexican border. Lee’s script seems cliché, and one of the interesting things about True West is that the audience doesn’t really know if the producer likes the story or if he is scared out of his wits what Lee will do to him if he doesn’t follow through on his word. As Lee and Austin spend more nights together and things start to unravel for Austin, he realizes the Hollywood game he thought he knew how to play doesn’t work the way he thought it did. The men become caught up in a “tornado country” of their own, where the clarity of their roles as brothers blows apart.

As for the Distillery Theatre’s production, there are several problems, most of which could be fixed. As Lee, Foster Davis is powerful and fully committed. Standing at 6’3", he towers over his brother. He struts with confidence and easily takes control of the room. Douglas Taurel, as Austin, who is supposed to have everything resting on his screenplay, is not so convincing. He never seems to get across the desperation that his deal must come through, even when he says the words, “Everything’s riding on this project.” He clearly fears Lee and wants to get rid of him, but the stakes never really seem very high for him regarding his work.

On the night I saw the play, in several noticeable instances, the actors did not seem to be paying attention to the space around them. For example, in the beginning, Lee knocked over one of his mother’s precious plants. Austin, previously seeming very meticulous about the house, was standing right next to the spilled plant, but he walked over to the other plants to water them before he picked up the spilled one. This happened again in Act II when Austin was supposed to make toast but never pressed down the buttons of the toasters. He then took toast from a plate (not out of the toasters) and offered it to Lee. Also, at one point, Lee made a big deal about looking for something to write with when there was a cup of about 20 pencils sitting on the table where he was supposedly searching. It may seem like I am nitpicking, but what could have been honest moments on stage ended up hurting the play’s credibility because the actors did not seem to be reacting to what was happening in the room.

John Unruh, as Saul, the movie producer, plays the role as a Hollywood phony. His choice might work better if he also seemed more powerful, the kind of person who would have a lot of pull in the movie business. Geraldine Bartlett, as the mom, does well with the role. It’s a strange and very interesting part. She walks into a room where her house is trashed, her plants are dead, her sons are drunk and going mad, and a typewriter, which has been smashed with a golf club, sits on the floor, and pretends that everything is all right. The set, designed by Caroline Abella, is a very convincing small, suburban kitchen.

The most interesting thing about True West is that the audience sees, by the end, as Lee becomes dependent on Austin’s writing ability and as Austin unravels and gets increasingly out of control, that the brothers are really very much alike. In this production, unfortunately, there is not a clear enough change. As Austin, Douglas Taurel does seem to enjoy his gain of power over his brother. He makes fun of him and enjoys refusing to write the script. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to care enough about his old script for the breakdown of his polite manners to be believable, and he probably doesn’t take his breakdown far enough. Throughout the course of the play, when his character’s life is torn apart, nothing seems to really happen. Except for the final moments, which are really believable, the brothers’ fundamental relationship seems to remain the same.

Despite all these problems, I wish I had been able to see the production of this very difficult play again. I would have loved to see Taurel play Lee and Davis play Austin. True West is one of my favorite plays, and I am curious to see what the actors do with the roles in reverse.

Karoline Leach's new play Tryst pits a smooth-talking gigolo with larcenous intent against a repressed spinster with low self-image in a contest of will shrouded in sexy mystery. Maxwell Caulfield plays the gigolo, who goes by the improbable name of George Love; his game is to find a lonely woman in a public place, chat her up, pretend to become interested and then fall in love with her, marry her, talk her into bringing her bank book with her on the honeymoon, steal her money, and leave her flat. Well, perhaps not entirely flat: "I spend the night with them, and make love to them with tenderness and consideration."

Amelia Campbell plays the spinster, Adelaide Pinchin, and her game is not so complicated, at least not at first. She works in a hat shop, but because she's so shy and homely (she says) she's consigned to stay in the back, away from the customers. She lives with her parents, has no friends and few prospects save a £50 inheritance and a diamond brooch she was given by a favorite aunt.

George spies Adelaide through the hat shop window and immediately begins to execute his plan. Within two days (!) she's agreed to marry him. Before we know it, they're at a modest boardinghouse in Weston Super Mare, man and wife. All systems are go, as far as George is concerned. Things look to take a little longer than he'd like—Adelaide seems fearful when it's time to consummate their vows, as it were, and she recoils from George's touch. As the curtain comes down on Act I, we leave the two demurely playing cards and drinking tea on their wedding night.

Leach provides twists as expected in the play's second act, but I'm afraid they're not very interesting. The likeliest outcome is for George to get a comeuppance, and indeed he does; but the transformation in Adelaide that brings it about doesn't jive with what we already know. Adelaide has been presented to us as desperate and, perhaps, manipulative in a passive-aggressive way. But the changes that we witness aren't grounded in either of these traits, and as a result are very hard to swallow.

Leach also gives George a Dickensian back story to match Adelaide's; this feels like a tactical mistake. In the end, instead of keeping us titilated and excited as the story gets sexier and more suspenseful, Tryst turns off the steam entirely and limps to a dull and unsatisfying conclusion.

This seems to me to be mostly the fault of the writing, by the way: Caulfield and Campbell deliver workmanlike performances, doing their utmost to make the material compelling. Director Joe Brancato manages a brisk pace in the first act, but things slacken somewhat in Act Two. Alejo Vietti's costumes and Jeff Nellis's lighting serve the piece nicely, but David Korins's massive unit set, which transforms cleverly from brick building to boardinghouse bedroom, is probably trying too hard to impress us. There is a brief moment of nudity near the end of the play (entirely unnecessary); the play's publicity photos to the contrary, it is Campbell, not Caulfield, who bares all in this gratuitous though dimly-lit scene.

Tryst wants to be a romantic thriller, I think, but Leach stops short of being either romantic enough or thrilling enough to accomplish her goal.

Aquila Theatre Company takes on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in this new production at Baruch Performing Arts Center. Aquila uses a technique they dub “theatrical utilitarianism” to bring Shakespeare revivals and adaptations to contemporary audiences, in hopes of creating “a production of truth and honesty… preventive of artifice and pretension.” For example, their production a few years ago of Much Ado About Nothing relocated the tale to London during the 1960s. They do not take such adaptive liberties with this production, which leans towards a more traditional, recognizably Shakespearean play, complete with Elizabethan attire and painted backdrop.

The story of Twelfth Night is basically this: A brother and sister, twins, are separated during a shipwreck and each believes the other to be dead. Viola, the sister, finding herself in a strange land, chooses to disguise herself as a man and puts herself in service of the town’s Duke, Orsino. Orsino has long been pursuing the Lady Olivia, but the love is quite unrequited. Orsino begins to make use of his unusually lovely page to woo the lady on his behalf. Lady is wooed, but mistakenly turns her affection to the page, Viola in drag as Cesario. And Viola cannot love the lady, if for no better reason than she has fallen deeply for her master. Matters get more complicated when Sebastian, Viola’s remarkably un-drowned brother, makes an appearance in the town, with his lackey Antonio, and mistaken identities abound—as do further misplaced affections.

Shakespeare usually treats his jokers with a certain gravity, but Feste, the fool of Twelfth Night, may be easily overlooked, and often is, in production. Here though, he appears to the audience as a sort of narrator, and remains the most visible character from beginning to end. Though played exceptionally by Louis Butelli, the fool is perhaps given too much responsibility, forced into the role of a sort of director in an often directionless play. There are almost too many textual loose ends to treat the play with kind of gravitas this superb fool gives it, especially in the moments of song which punctuate the play.

“Theatrical Utility” seems a tricky business, especially with such a frivolous comedy. What, if anything, is utilitarian about it? Aquila does an effective job of making the script understandable, without losing the comedy; but they insist a bit hard towards an overall meaning—which feels artificial and forced. Sense is not really required for this comedy, and the play is best when Aquila ignores it instead of pushing for it. It is more fun when it’s just a comedy; the shameless milking of each of the sexually referential jokes and the sight gags are definitely high points. A particularly funny one involves three stooges spying and attempting to hide behind some ridiculously ineffective, and festive, cover.

Music is prominently featured, with archaic instruments such as the lute and harpsichord alongside, and occasionally mixed in with, electronic drum and bass. This highlights, with a strange grace, other aspects of the design, especially swinging Elizabethan skirts and the perspective in the glowing backdrop of the town. Sometimes the music feels heavy-handed, not always effectively informing the world of the play, but it does keep the energy of the show lively.

Some excellent performances may be the best reason to see this Twelfth Night. Malvolio is superbly rendered by Kenn Sabberton, treating himself with utmost sincerity, even in the most ridiculous situation. Lisa Carter is an enormously accessible Olivia. And Olivia’s drunken cousin (Anthony Cochrane) and suitor (Lincoln Hudson) are extremely funny, as well as good comedic counterparts, especially when aligned with the fool.

However,Viola/Cesario, played by Lindsay Rae Taylor, is problematic—the character is required to be believably male, but irresistible as a female, and in this production the difficulty is not dealt with effectively. Taylor is believable as man, a kind of Alex P. Keaton/Michael J. Fox of the Elizabethan era, but still nowhere near as handsome or charming as Orsino, the Count whom Olivia persists in rejecting. And as a woman, she just doesn’t stand out as much as a leading lady ought.

Audiences who are unfamiliar with Shakespeare will find themselves in good hands with Aquila. As a company, they bring together British and American artists, fusing diverse style and training in the actors, which creates something that stays pretty coherent, and keep most of the text from ever becoming dense. Twelfth Night is an especially good vehicle for Aquila’s uses, since it’s not too dense to begin with. Whether the production is “preventive of artifice and pretension” is debatable, but the play is easy to follow, and most often enjoyable.

With strong performances, and a good overall energy, Twelfth Night should not disappoint those who are familiar with Aquila already, and is likely to pleasantly surprise those who aren’t.

There's a big rollicking musical comedy hit in Central Park right now; if we're lucky, it will zip over to Broadway, where it belongs and where it's sorely needed, before too long. I'm talking about Two Gentlemen of Verona, the John Guare-Mel Shapiro reshaping of Shakespeare's early play of the same name (the Bard put a "The" in front of his title). The Public Theatre has revived it in a deliciously entertaining production helmed by Kathleen Marshall, with an exuberant and engaging cast of first-rate singing, dancing, and comedic actors. It's currently ensconced in the blissful environs of the Delacorte as part of their free Shakespeare in the Park series, but it's going to look and feel just as fine indoors on the Great White Way.

The first act is pretty much 75 minutes of uninterrupted bliss. We meet the two gents of the title—Proteus (played with a charming mix of insouciance and naiveté by Oscar Isaac), who falls head over heels in love with a local farm girl named Julia; and Valentine (performed with assurance and panache by golden-voiced Norm Lewis, who at last has been given a role fully worthy of his immense talents), who is about to leave for the big city of Milan in search of fame and fortune. Just as things are heating up with Julia, however, Proteus's dad announces that he must go to Milan himself. Proteus doesn't realize that Julia is now pregnant and heads off; Julia, with her wily servant Lucetta, disguises herself as a man and hits the road to find her lover.

Meanwhile, in Milan, Valentine sets up shop as a professional letter writer and falls in love at first sight with Silvia, the daughter of the city's head honcho, the Duke. Silvia was in love with a fellow named Eglamour, but her father sent him off to war and has instead betrothed her to the rich but entirely repulsive Thurio. Notwithstanding all of this, when Silvia turns up at Valentine's shop, she switches her allegiance abruptly to Valentine (after a thrilling, quick courtship to the tune of Two Gentlemen's best number, the bona fide show-stopper "Night Letter"). Valentine plans to elope with her... until Proteus shows up, sees Silvia, and falls in love with her himself. Julia and Lucetta (in male drag) soon arrive as well, and then the complications ensue and ensue. When intermission comes, following Proteus's nasty song of planned deception called "Calla Lily Lady," we're on pins and needles waiting to see how these messes can get sorted out and the lovers can be correctly matched up.

Act Two doesn't disappoint: everybody is paired off properly by the time the show is over, though Guare makes his gentlemen go through rather more enforced growing up than Shakespeare ever did.

Throughout there's plenty of comedy (broad slapstick and wordplay); music in a variety of styles from the early '70s, from rock to country to funk to at least one old-fashioned (and excellent) musical theatre ballad ("Love's Revenge," beautifully sung by Lewis)—it's all composed by Galt McDermot, and while nothing here is as catchy or well-known as some of his work for Hair, it's a grand score, deserving to be heard anew; and terrific performances by Isaac, Lewis, Renee Elise Goldenberry (who sizzles and shimmers as Silvia), Mel Johnson, Jr. (properly authoritative and villainous as the Duke), John Cariani (perfect as the foolish servant Speed), and Megan Lawrence, who pretty much stops the show cold unexpectedly with a song called "Betrayal" (about which more in a moment).

The casting of Rosario Dawson as Julia is the production's one significant misstep; Dawson is a knockout, physically, but her singing voice is just too thin to do her numbers justice. But I'd start polishing Tony Awards for Lawrence, Johnson, Goldenberry, Isaac, and Lewis (alright, they probably can't all win, but they deserve to).

The production design is superlative, especially Martin Pakledinaz's colorful, imaginative costumes, which brilliantly bridge the Elizabethan floridity of the intact Shakespeare passages (of which there are many) and Guare and Shapiro's sprightly contemporary accompaniments. Riccardo Hernandez has provided a simple set whose main elements are two heart-shaped playing areas beneath the orchestra. With Peter Kaczorwoski's evocative lighting, it serves the show perfectly.

There's also a dog—Buster, as Crab, canine companion to Proteus's servant Launce; he's adorable and also stops the show when he puts his mind to it.

And there's also—and this was the part I was not expecting—social relevance of the timeliest sort, the main difference between now and 1971 being that we seem to have to borrow our activist art instead of creating it for ourselves. Guare, scarily prescient, has the Duke sing a song called "Bring the Boys Back Home" that contains this cynical snippet:

If we didn't have a war
Then where
Would we spend our money
Where
Welfare, clean air, child care

And, a few lines later, this refrain:

I'm patriotic
To a man
For God, for country
And Milan

"Betrayal," Lucetta's dark indictment of Proteus's behavior vis-à-vis her mistress Julia, ventures into a larger context as well

The air that we breathe is polluted
The wars that we fight are the same
But no one is quite sure who leads us
So no one is ever to blame

I'm proud to say that the audience packing the Delacorte at the performance I attended burst into spontaneous applause during both of these songs, which I take to be a sign that in addition to its vast capacity to entertain, Two Gentlemen of Verona would appear to have some very pertinent things to say to a Bush Era audience. It needs to go to Broadway and reach as many people as possible.

The plays of W. B. Yeats are not easy plays to “get.” Yeats was first and foremost a poet known for such works as “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Second Coming” (“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold….”), and his plays are often highly theatrical works written with a poets’ eye. Fortunately, the members of Handcart Ensemble get Yeats, and the company’s staging of two of his one-act plays, simply titled Two Yeats Plays, serves as a fine introduction to his dramatic vision.

The first play, The Cat and the Moon, is about neither—it’s the tale of two beggars, one blind and one lame, who make a pilgrimage to a holy well in search of miracle cures. A saint appears to them at the well and gives each a choice—do they want to be healed, or would they instead rather be blessed? Ensemble members David D’Agostini and Javen Tanner are an engaging duo as the two beggars; Tanner in particular does some fine physical work as the lame beggar, and also earns a few laughs as his character grills the saint about exactly what the benefits of a blessing are.

The Only Jealousy of Emer is the second play; it’s based on a story from a Celtic epic about the hero Cuchulain, in which his wife Emer rescues him from an enchantment cast on him by the fairy woman Fand. Yeats took some liberties with the myth, introducing a trickster god who intervenes to give Emer a choice—he will rescue Cuchulain if she agrees to give up one of the things she values most. Those completely unfamiliar with Irish mythology might feel a bit at sea, but this is entirely the playwright’s fault—Yeats assumed his audiences knew, or at least should know, more about Celtic mythology than some of them actually did. Fortunately, taking a quick look at Handcart’s program notes during intermission is more than enough to bring you up to speed. Even if you don’t, it’s clear enough that Emer, played with grave nobility by Jjana Valentiner, is being pressed into making a heartbreaking choice.

The company really shines in capturing the look of the plays. Yeats was strongly influenced by Japanese Noh theatre, using masks, music, and symbolic gestures and dance in his works. Designer Elena Zlotescu serves double duty with set and costumes, creating elaborate masks for the characters in each piece and using only four wooden planks and a heavy drop cloth to stand in for both a country road and Cuchulain’s hall. In this world, though, that’s enough—our beggars tramp just as well along those wooden planks as they would along a more realistic road. It’s also striking on a purely visual level as well, with the black box of the stage setting off the bright white and stark red of those planks, and Zlotescu’s rich robes for the court of Cuchulain and the plain white robes of the supporting ensemble.

Each play also begins with a sung form of one of Yeats’s poems, and ends with a dance. I did wish for a slightly different arrangement for the poem that preceded Emer—musically it's lovely, but it is sung in a modified round style and I couldn’t quite catch the words. The dance in Emer was similarly lovely but seemed to challenge others in the audience slightly (a woman with two young children sat behind me, and during Emer’s dance I overheard a whispered, “Mom, what’s that lady doing?”). The music and dance in The Cat and the Moon are more closely tied to the plot, and I even heard some audience members singing “The Cat and the Moon” to themselves during intermission.

Yeats aficionados should definitely consider attending, while those in search of something a little different, and those looking for a bit of a challenge, will also be amply rewarded.

The first thing that strikes you as you enter the Medicine Show Theater Ensemble’s space for their production of the Arnold Weinstein-John Gruen musical Undercover Lover is the set: apparently an apartment. The double-doors to the bathroom (really? The bathroom?) don’t quite match, one doorknob is different from the other; one of the twin beds seems a normal length, the other extends only three feet or so; and the whole is set miles upstage. Something is off. But something is off about the whole production.

It’s an odd bird, this Undercover Lover. Written by East Village regulars Arnold Weinstein (book and lyrics) and John Gruen (music) in 1959-1961, the show was their shot at that traditional Broadway genre, the musical comedy. Weinstein and Gruen ran with a crowd—Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler are the names of three downtown poets mentioned in the program of the show—not usually associated with the Broadway theatre. Also in the program for the show, poet Frank O’Hara is said to have “collaborated” on the lyrics, and American art song composer William Bolcom is credited with the original arrangements (like O’Hara’s credit, in the same font size and type as Weinstein and Gruen).

If Weinstein and Gruen’s names won’t get people in the door, certainly O’Hara and Bolcom’s names will. And in this lies the curiosity value of the piece. Certainly, I was drawn to the show by the participation of O’Hara and Bolcom in its composition, and I was anxious to see what they would have brought to a Broadway musical. The unfortunate answer: Not much. Undercover Lover might have been worthy of a concert staging over one or two nights, just as a sop to that curiosity. Medicine Show might even have done better to offer just such a concert staging as a fundraiser. But a full-blown production? This is putting the cart before the horse, or at the very least the money before the value.

For all these names associated with the avant-garde movement, the show is curiously of its time, maybe even a little behind it. The story (which I’ll get to in a minute) is reminiscent of nothing so much as the old Rock Hudson-Doris Day marital comedies, maybe run through Billy Wilder’s typewriter around the time of The Apartment, except without the wit and panache. The first few scenes, set in a married couple’s apartment and the apartment of the husband’s mistress, flirt with explaining the boredom of the marriage and the frustration of the mistress without really showing it, and the jokes never really surprise. The titles of the songs—“I’ll Never Be the Same Until You’re Different,” “Her or Me,” “I’m Going to Leave You”—indicate the general unambitious level of the lyrics (sorry, O’Hara fans, but there’s nothing for you to see here), and the music is generally tuneless and about as memorable.

Unfortunately the production values don’t help the show along. The set is a fairly shabby affair, pieces like chairs and sofas skipping unpredictably across the stage (poor Beth Griffith, as the wife, nearly took a header off one chair during the performance I saw), and includes a most unconvincing fold-out chair-bed that looks put together from old fruit crates. This, and the uninspired lighting design that floods the stage, similarly unpredictably, serve to detract from the book, lyrics, and music.

The brave cast—the aforementioned Beth Griffith and Sarah Engelke as the mistress are stand-outs, and I’d love to see more of them—struggles mightily to find some fun in the proceedings, but they’re crippled by Weinstein and Gruen’s tedious book and score, as well as a story in which they can’t seem to find any dramatic purchase.

Oh yes, that story: Leslie and Hy Halifax are celebrating (if that’s the word) the fifth anniversary of a loveless, sexless marriage; for all of her seductive charms, she can’t draw Hy away from his darts game. Fleeing the apartment, Hy visits his mistress Myra, who presents him with an ultimatum: leave Leslie for her, or the whole affair is off. Hy returns to his apartment to find that his old shipmate buddy Boats (Boats?) has dropped into town for a visit. But Boats has other reasons to be in town: now a pacifist, he’s going to lead a protest at an air raid drill downtown the next day. (Maybe people did protest air-raid drills in the early 1960s. But I don’t believe it.) Enchanted by his political activism, Leslie falls head-over-heels for Boats (something else I didn’t believe), granting Hy his request for a divorce. The next day the protest, in front of City Hall, occurs at the same time as Hy’s visit to the divorce court to file papers; Boats is at the protest, and Leslie has joined him, but Boats spurns Leslie’s advances, leaving her alone and bereft. Hy, having had second thoughts, does not file for the divorce. Myra, awaiting Hy, receives a telegram from him explaining that he couldn’t go through with the separation.

And that’s Act I, nearly an hour-and-a-half long: at the end, for all that apparent movement, the characters are no further along than at the beginning, and neither are we. I looked at the program, figured that there was another hour to go at the very least, and decided that, if true love did triumph, it would have to do so without me. I left at intermission.

As a rule, I rarely come across a one-person show that holds my interest from the opening moment to the last, and I seldom find one that actually entertains me. Unsuspecting Susan does both, despite the play’s complete lack of action on stage. The credit for this feat can firmly be given to the star of the show, Celia Imrie, who wins us over with humor in the beginning and keeps our interest as events take a sudden, sharp turn into dark territory.

The play focuses on Susan Chester, a well-to-do older woman, living alone in the home she inherited from her parents. Her life’s focus, aside from gossiping about the neighbors, is clearly her estranged son. Simon, we quickly learn, has suffered from mental problems his entire life. As Susan expresses her hope for him as she relates his current prospects, living with a roommate in London, it’s clear to the audience that something is wrong, but through Susan’s eyes, it’s hard to see what. It turns out Simon has (unwittingly?) taken up with terrorists, and after they hatch their plot, Susan is left to attempt to cope with the consequences.

In our post-9/11 world, the play’s dark turn forces us to think of terrorism in a different way. Instead of the typical path of exploring the stories of the victims or the survivors, playwright Stewart Permutt chooses to focus on Susan’s unusual plight—her relationship to Simon causes those around her to associate her with terrorist acts, despite her complete lack of participation in them. Imrie presents Susan as entirely self-deluded, which makes her transformation throughout the play even more chilling. Director Lisa Forrell wisely gets out of Imrie’s way, letting the stage veteran shine. Designer Nigel Hook’s compact and carefully executed set elegantly enhances Imrie’s characterization.

Unsuspecting Susan is a compelling addition to the Brits Off Broadway festival, a relatively new addition to New York’s growing summer festival scene. If the other plays in the festival are of this caliber, New Yorkers have yet another worthy theatre festival to consider each summer, and another air-conditioned place to escape to on those hot summer nights.

Most folks know that the “S” in S&M comes from the Marquis DeSade, but very few seem to know that the “M” comes from Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch and his novel Venus In Furs.

Michael Scott-Price of Firebrand Theory Theatre Company has faithfully adapted the novel into a play, which tells the story of Severin (Jaime Robert Carrillo), a gent who loves to be beaten and abused by women. When Severin meets Wanda (Kim Katzberg), he tries to transform her into his perfect dominatrix, but after he hands himself over to her, Wanda turns out to be a lot crueler than Severin ever expected. The story is allegedly based on events that actually happened to Masoch, and the novel is a classic work that has rightfully earned Masoch immortality (even if he’s only known as the guy who gave us the “M”).

Scott-Price’s adaptation, perhaps, relies too heavily on text from the novel. There are numerous voiceover narrations that sound like the narrative of a first-person novel, and much of the dialogue seems to have been transcribed, unedited, from the book as well. The result is that Severin and Wanda trade longwinded speeches while patiently awaiting their turn to speak. The action onstage also slows to a crawl when the unseen narrator analyzes Severin’s thoughts (with the occasional quote from Goethe, as per Masoch’s writing style in the book).

This all shows the difference between dialogue that is meant to be read and dialogue that is meant to be spoken. What might make a fascinating novel makes a boring play.

Compounding this problem is the fact that the performances don't do much to elevate the material. Both Carrillo and Katzberg have a tendency to overplay their characters, making them overblown and implausible. The two also seem to have little romantic chemistry, leaving it up to the dialogue to convince the audience that the characters are swept up in a passionate fantasy. The voiceover narrative that pops in occasionally is delivered in a lifeless monotone.

Given the subject matter, one would expect some degree of eroticism. An adaptation of Venus In Furs needn’t be pornographic, but it should at least convey the desires felt by its characters. Unfortunately this show isn't the least bit sexy. Even the use of gratuitous toplessness in one scene fails to add much in the way of naughtiness to the proceedings.

The novel features a prologue and epilogue (cut from the show) that reveal that Severin learned his lesson from Wanda and thereafter takes the dominant roles in his relationships. This epilogue offers some valid and insightful theories on feminism, which are not present in Firebrand Theory’s adaptation.

The concept of a stage adaptation of Masoch’s most famous work is certainly a good idea, but this adaptation fails to show audiences why Venus In Furs is a classic to begin with.

With a twinkle in her eye, a librarian (played by the luminous Kathryn Grody) welcomes us into her domain. Searchers and researchers inhabit her library’s bottomless stacks, hunting for clues to their existential mysteries. A trucker (Happy Anderson) comes seeking something to fill his lonesome nights on the road. She leads him to some Steinbeck, in hardback: a tome hefty and intriguing enough to keep him away from prostitutes. A father (Michael Rudko), urgently wanting to offer his daughter spiritual guidance, sifts through footnotes and uncovers the story of an astronomer who lost his position over a morals charge. And a government functionary, tracking terrorists through their library records, abandons his mission when offered a quote from William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

At its best, an evening of one-act plays serves up a sampler of such necessary slivers of poetry. Susan Miller’s Reading List, the final play of the evening, concludes with a cacophonous hymn to the vast world of ideas that suggests the evening’s accomplishments in miniature. Featuring the work of an accomplished group of playwrights, the Vital Theater Company nourishes and delights with the third series of their 10th Vital Signs New Works Festival.

In Ride, Eric Lane introduces a pair of young coworkers at a roadside fruit stand. I wondered why the poised, socially sophisticated Molly (Marina Squerciati) has the job. Her father has just given her a new car, suggesting the position is not a necessity. Carrie (Stacy Parker), on the other hand, seems quite at home in the dingy circumstances. Her awe and excitement at the enormity of Molly’s gift gushes forth in a torrent of adolescent enthusiasm. Parker ably sustains this adolescent aria, through which Lane etches a textured relationship between these two girls. Molly’s sullen silence proves to have deep roots, which are painfully exposed. At the climax of the play, in a moment of emotional freefall, Molly impulsively offers to give Carrie her new car. What would this mean for their relationship with each other, and their families? Director Daisy Walker stages this climactic moment perhaps a little too quickly for its fully resonance, but I admired the completeness of Lane’s structure nonetheless.

Andrea Lepcio’s Second Kiss also tells the story of an adolescent girl, this one more of a loner. Our narrator is just not interested in sex, and a bit befuddled by her peers who think of nothing else. Jenny Gamello is beautifully cast, playing the girl with a charming mix of sensitivity and guilelessness. She is well-matched when Jenna Kalinowki, playing an older girl of 18, swaggers in and helps her solve the mystery of the missing libido. Lepcio hits all the right notes, finding a surprising arrangement for this familiar story. Stephanie Gilman’s direction and clean light cues give the piece just the right pace and punctuation.

Garth Wingfield’s Please Have a Seat and Someone Will Be With You Shortly feels the least literary of any of the pieces, thanks to the light, conversational playing of Michael Anderson as David and Karin Sibrava as Sue. They are perfectly matched as gentle, mildly neurotic souls, patients whose therapists share the same waiting room. They have the same appointment time, and have seen each other every week for months. Until tonight, though, they have never spoken. Their flirtation unfolds out of the simple human presence of the two actors. At no point does the script bend to make a joke. And if the simple setup seems unambitious, it proves sufficient for Wingfield to invoke an adult relationship in its entirety.

Only Notes, by Kate Moira Ryan, fails to live up to its ambitions. The script shows potential: it is a broadly farcical piece about a narcissistic TV actress and her severe, pretentious Russian acting coach. Ryan writes smart riffs, appropriately exaggerating the stereotypes. Elizabeth Hess grounds the hysterics of the actress in a way that points toward the right style for the piece. But Susan Finch’s Russian émigré comes across sketchy and life-sized, when Ryan’s script calls for something larger. The timing of the performance pointed up where the audience should laugh, but to me the response felt obligatory, at best. For the piece to soar the way it wants to demands a deeper excavation of the characters’ base desires, and clowns skilled enough to act on them. This production has neither.

Which returns us to Miller’s Reading List, which digs deep, takes risks, and succeeds beautifully. Whereas the other pieces are remarkably focused and concise, this one is messy. Expansively directed by Cynthia Croot, it relies less on logic and plot than on the root faith that calls plays into being. Miller begins by invoking a sense of alarm, familiar among liberal theatre audiences, at the current assaults on our freedom of speech. More than just ringing that alarm, though, Miller portrays an array of characters, ordinary people armed with their own particular slices of knowledge against the paranoia behind these assaults.

In a series of fantastic encounters, Reading List cracks the naturalistic frame that has so far given shape to the evenings’ plays. With her story fragments and parables, Miller sermonizes in direct contradiction to the paranoia that assaults creative freedom. Grody’s librarian, the ringleader in Reading List, appears quite ordinary: a heavyset, frizzy-haired middle-aged woman who spends hours attending to the minutiae of her field. But the spark in Grody’s eyes ignites the ideas that have been flashing across the stage, not just in her play but throughout the evening. Led by Grody, the excellent cast shows Miller’s play to be a recipe for alchemy, transforming a brief evening of well-wrought scenes into theatrical gold.

One of the things that Daniel arap Moi did during his 24 years as President of Kenya was to outlaw homosexuality. Calling it "un-African," he made it a capital crime. Things are better, but only by degree, for sexual minorities in Kenya (you can read more here). Now, why I am bringing this up? Because I have just seen Waafrika, Nanna Mwaluko's invaluable and informative new play about a Kenyan woman who falls in love with an American woman. I'll wager that the vast majority of people reading this are ignorant of the repressive treatment of gays and lesbians in this African nation. That's why my job is so interesting: theatre teaches me, enlarges me—just about every single day.

In Waafrika, Awino, the favorite daughter of a local tribal chief named Odhiambo, has left her home and gone to live with Bobby, a former Peace Corps volunteer who has decided to stay on in Kenya. Bobby is an out, and outspoken, lesbian; she wants Awino to embrace her new-found sexual identity with vigor and pride. But Awino knows that while Bobby is buffered from the facts of African life by her American sense of privilege, such a step is fraught with peril. Homosexuality is punishable by the death penalty (and indeed, as the play begins we hear news broadcasts on a radio about two young men who have been arrested for kissing in public and now face possible execution).

What's special about Waafrika is that Mwaluko is so in touch with African culture that we genuinely assimilate pieces of it by the time the play is over. Certainly aspects of the Kenyans relationships with nature and with ancestors feel alien to an American sensibility; but Mwaluko plumbs deeply enough to give us real insight into the mindsets of Odhiambo, Awino, and the other African characters in this play. So when we hear that some of the villagers are starting to believe that Bobby and Awino's taboo love is the cause of a seven-month-long famine, we don't immediately reject this is as backward mumbo-jumbo. Indeed, Mwaluko gives us a splendid character—Odhiambo's first wife—to articulate many of the beliefs of this society, helping us to appreciate and begin to understand them. For this, if no other reason, Waafrika stands as an important cultural artifact because it does this so effectively.

Just as significant is the exploration of  ritual female circumcision that is incorporated into the plot. It will be hard to think impassively about this issue after the startlingly frank treatment that Mwaluko gives it here.

And of course there's also a love story—two of them, really: one between the two women and another between Awino and her father (and, by extension, her people). Mwaluko is perhaps more proficient writing about substantive issues than emotional ones—these parts of Waafrika feel at once overwritten and undernourished, as if Mwaluko is reticent to bare the souls of the characters involved. But the play nevertheless balances all of its complicated components with sufficient skill to keep us entirely riveted throughout, and to become significantly invested in all of them.

Director Stacy Waring's production is splendid, particularly given the bare-bones festival environment. The play begins and ends with African rituals; the opening features thrilling drumming (by Adrain Washington) that accompanies a mimed scene depicting Awino's transformation from traditional Kenyan values to a realization of her true nature as a lesbian woman—it's terrific. The cast is fine: Jennifer J. Joseph as the Chief's first wife is especially memorable, while Ahmat Jallo as Odhiambo and Zainab Jah as Awino are also outstanding.

Mwaluko isn't afraid to suggest that Americans are imperfect: his characterization of Bobby is wonderfully flawed, helping us to refocus on the challenges of this foreign culture with a less subjective vision. This is good for us. More plays are promised about the African and African American experience; I will look forward to them all.

It's an exciting prospect to see the 50th anniversary production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a very well-known but not very often produced play—especially since the first production had such an impact on modern theatre that the play is considered by many to be a turning point in contemporary drama. It is a disappointment that this production at the Theatre at St. Clement's is not in the same spirit of daring and originality.

Vladimir and Estragon, who call each other Didi and Gogo, respectively, are two souls who could be anyone and who are nowhere. They come to the same desolate spot by a dead tree every day to wait for Godot. It is not explained who Godot is or why they are waiting. They fill up their time with childish games, share their meager supply of carrots and radishes, and start the next day the same way. Estragon often has to be reminded by Vladimir that they were there the day before. They encounter two men; a slave owner named Pozzo and his chattel, Lucky. They are also met by a Boy who delivers the message that Mr. Godot will not come today but he will tomorrow. The significance of these characters and their meanings are wildly open to interpretation and this review is not the place to try, but if you are interested, John Fletcher's book Samuel Beckett's Art (Barnes and Noble, 1967) is a great resource.

The cast, except for Tanner Rich as the Boy, is made up of seasoned Broadway actors. Sam Coppola as Vladimir and Joseph Ragno as Estragon are a perfect match physically. Coppola is big and slump-shouldered, carrying the weight of the world with resigned soft humor and Ragno is short and fast moving, lashing out while Coppola lumbers. Unfortunately, Alan Hruska's direction does not make enough of this, and instead gives questionable motivations to the actors.

The pair would be an ideal comedy duo if Coppola's Vladimir was not resigned in such a satisfied way. It feels like he could wait for Godot or not—it doesn't really matter because he's basically okay with his lot. As a result, Ragno's Estragon does not have much to lash out against or a reason to stay and wait. That may seem in keeping with a play where "nothing happens," but the comedy lies in the enormous effort of attempting something that results in futility. That is also why the silent hat-switching and pratfall vaudeville routines are unsuccessful. They are pulled off easily, with no effort but with no payoff either. Ed Setrakain as Pozzo works well as a despicable man who later turns up blind in the second act, but the real standout is Martin Shakar, as the slave Lucky. His portrayal of a man tied to another man but who won't free himself is heart breaking, pathetic, and disturbing. You feel terrible for him and don't want him near you.

The set designed by Ken Foy has the requisite tree and bare landscape but with the neat touch of a painted circular playing space that looks like a view of Earth from a satellite. It makes one think that the characters could be any of us spending our time on this planet. The costumes by Ann Hould-Ward are not as original, using the Laurel and Hardy-esque baggy pants and bowler hats that have become identified with the play.

Waiting For Godot changed our expectations of what theatre can address in ways that are now taken for granted. Beckett was the first to experiment with how much he could strip away from theatrical conventions while retaining the essence of drama. In this production, all that we are familiar with—the hobo costumes, the banter, and the silent vaudeville routines—are there, but with the exception of Shakar, there seems to have been no attempt to find a greater meaning in the text. It's really too bad that the play's signature line "nothing to be done" has been taken so literally.

The Mint Theater Company’s mission is to present as faithfully as it can neglected works in the history of drama; this season, they’re concentrating on American women playwrights of the early 20th century. What better season opener, then, than an unproduced play by Dawn Powell (1896-1965), recently rediscovered as a more ambitious Dorothy Parker of sorts?

Powell’s novels and stories are renowned for a deep vein of romantic, pessimistic, and satiric feeling, but with a curiously contemporary feel for our time. Chronicler of Manhattan life and love in the first half of the20th century, she has a fair claim to be the ur-Candace Bushnell, who plays much the same role for the beginning of our own century. Indeed, were it not for the Norma Talmadge posters on the wall, the references to Wallace Beery, and the injunction to keep your rooming-house door open when you’ve got a visitor of the opposite sex (not to mention references to prices of the period—$21.95 for a stylish camel-hair coat—that these days never fail to raise a chuckle or two), you might be forgiven for thinking you’re enjoying yet another adventure in the lives of Carrie Bradshaw and the gang.

Even if you don’t remember New York in the ‘20s and ‘30s, you’ve got an idea of it in your head—what a wacky, crazy, bawdy sort of town, Mecca to small-town types with stars in their eyes. Anything can happen in this nutty city, and dreams die hard here, but darn it all, guys and gals still fall in love. You just gotta watch out for those hard-hearted dance-hall Johnnies and fading chorus girls, but underneath it all, they’re saps for a young couple in love, too. Some things never change.

All right. Maybe Powell’s 1931 play Walking Down Broadway, which is just receiving its world premiere at the Mint in a handsome new production, isn’t quite that familiar, but there are times at which it veers dangerously close. Marge and Elsie, friends from Marble Falls, USA, move to New York in search of adventure and get jobs as office girls; after eight months without a date, they promenade down Broadway in search of guys and attract the attention of Chick and Dewey, two Victrola salesmen, similarly from small towns. Marge and Chick fall for each other hard, while Elsie tries desperately to retain the attentions of fashion-plate Dewey. Chick gets Marge “into trouble” (you know what that means), Chick solicits advice from his cynical, worldly roommate Mac (you know what that means), and Marge’s next door neighbor, the similarly cynical and worldly former advertising model and Follies girl Eva, suggests that Marge visit a “special doctor” (you know what that means).

So far so good, as well-built period pieces like Walking Down Broadway go, and there are moments in this show that call to mind a 75-year-old episode of Sex and the City, were there such a thing. A decision about abortion, for example, is a central issue of the script, and just as voluble an issue for today. (One of the play’s weaknesses is its failure to deal with the emotional implications of the decision once it’s been made, a weakness it shares with most Sex and the City episodes: a potentially serious issue is raised, juggled for a scene or two, then blissfully forgotten in a mad dash to wrap up the loose ends of the plot.) For a script by a writer of Powell’s reputation, there are flashes of genuine independent wit and inspiration here and there, but she walks a dangerous, thin line between romanticism and cynicism, and she falters several times. Mac, the eternal bachelor, has to end up married; Eva, the blowsy blonde, turns out to have a heart of gold. Which doesn’t make this a bad play, necessarily, just a predictable one from our perspective in 2005.

Steven Williford’s staging occasionally falls prey to the same pitfalls as the play itself, undecided whether it’s a comedy or a sociological study. The first five minutes have all the rat-tat-tat dialogue and razzmatazz blocking of 42nd Street without the songs, yet at the end of the first act there’s a long scene in which the two young lovers seem glued to the couch for 10 or 15 minutes. Of the 10-person cast, the attractive young lovers get the most stage time, of course, and Christine Allbright as Marge and Denis Butkus as Chick acquit themselves well, though Allbright seems to have more of a grasp on the emotional changes of her character than Butkus does of his; he ends the play more or less where he began emotionally, though it must be said that of the two the experience has been more traumatic for Marge.

Of the rest of the cast, Amanda Jones is a bright presence with a hard edge as Marge’s fun-loving roommate Elsie, a fair match for the consistently distracted, superficial Dewey of Ben Roberts. Both Carol Halstead as peroxide-blonde Eva and Antony Hagopian as worldly man-about-town Mac are broadly played—Halstead sashays across the stage, nearly stealing every scene in which she appears, and Hagopian’s sharp, self-absorbed sarcasm cuts through the sometimes diffuse atmosphere that the less-focused Butkus and Roberts occasionally create—but then, Powell’s characters are broadly drawn, so they can hardly be faulted for that.

All that said, while Walking Down Broadway is far from an undiscovered masterpiece, it has been unduly neglected—there’s no reason I can see for its waiting three-quarters-of-a-century for its world premiere, and it’s admirable that this is the first show of a Mint season devoted to little-known plays by American women. It easily holds its own against the mainstream comedy-dramas of the period written by men, providing a much-missed emphasis on the distaff perspective of Depression-era New York love and sex.

The exquisite set and costumes are by Roger Hanna and Brenda Turpin respectively; the period details of both seem to have walked right off the pages of a book of vintage photographs.

Though the war in Vietnam is raging half a world away, with its attendant disruptions to law and order here at home, the War in Paramus of Barbara Dana's play is contained entirely to the 1970 suburban New Jersey household where it takes place. Here, 15-year-old Thelma Gardner is battling a family that doesn't get her—not because she's a rebellious teen who worships Janis Joplin and tows the anti-Establishment line espoused by her age group and their idols; but rather (and only) because the Gardners are severely dysfunctional. Were it not for a keen survival instinct and plenty of street smarts, Thelma might not have lasted this long.

Here's the sitch: Mom (Violet) is a terminally dissatisfied social climber whose only real affection seems to be for her elder daughter Jennifer and whose attention at the moment is focused alternately on planning Jennifer's upcoming wedding and redecorating the den. Jennifer, five years older than Thelma, is pretty, smart, spoiled, and self-centered. Dad (Bill) is detached, foolish (he walks around the house in his pajamas singing "Who Can I Turn To" in one scene), and emotionally distant and immature.

Thelma is jealous of all the attention Jennifer is getting because of her impending nuptials (shades of The Member of the Wedding, I thought); and acting out in increasingly extravagant ways to try to get some kind of reaction from her (apparently) cold-hearted mother and lunk-headed father. The main action of the play takes place on a particularly eventful night that begins with Jennifer informing her fiancé Kevin that, contrary to previous indications, she does NOT want to move to Cleveland (where he's just made a down payment on a home for them); continues through a forlorn "party" thrown by Thelma for two delinquent pals from high school who are planning to rob a local doughnut store; climaxes comically with Kevin and Jennifer's return home, exhausted and furious after a messy date, after which Jennifer flirts with Thelma's friends and passes out while one of the boys slashes Kevin's arm with his hunting knife; and then crescendos with Thelma's disappearance from the house. When she finally returns, it is with a truly startling revelation that feels wholly out of proportion with the period hijinks that have heretofore occurred in the play.

Playwright Dana has had a distinguished career in the theatre as an actor, and is also the author of several children's books. This is her first play, however, and it shows: though War in Paramus has plenty on its mind and in its heart, it strains credulity continuously, and offers characters who, Thelma excepted, are so calculatedly lacking in generosity of spirit toward one another that they're very hard to spend time with. The male characters, in particular, are so devoid of admirable qualities as to arouse suspicions of misandry on Dana's part; though the heartlessness of Jennifer vis-a-vis both sister and fiancé offers a certain kind of balance.

Despite the knottiness of the script and story, Abingdon Theatre's presentation of War in Paramus is as credible a rendering as I can imagine. Director Austin Pendleton has done a masterful job maintaining suspense and interest, and he's introduced a kind of heightened stylization to the thing in places that makes the play's excesses easier to swallow. He's also assembled a mostly fine cast, led by the remarkable Anne Letscher, who is entirely believable as a troubled teen throughout and has one scene, when Thelma is in hysterics, that is so utterly convincing as to be horrifyingly show-stopping. Matthew Arkin, as Bill, does his best with a role that makes little sense; ditto Jeremy Beiler, who functions mostly as comic relief (very effectively) as schlemiel-like boyfriend Kevin. Lisa McCormick is beautiful as Jennifer, though the role is so underwritten that there's little else for her to do. Only Kate Bushmann disappoints as Thelma's mother, Violet, who I think could be made more complicated and more sympathetic with a reading less superficial than this one. Michael Schweikardt's set and Wade Laboissonniere's costumes confused me with regard to the economic status of the family: the set suggests lower-middle-class (as does the father's apparent failure in business), but the costumes—especially Jennifer's—bespeak a level of chic and sophistication that made me wonder if the family could really afford them.

To be honest, when I heard the premise of Welcome To Tourettaville, I was convinced it had to be a satire. Tourettavile, you see, is a children's musical about Tourette Syndrome, a condition that causes its sufferers to involuntarily spew profanity, among other symptoms. What, I ask you, could make for a better parody of sugar-coated children's theatre? It turns out that …Tourettaville is on the level. Not only is it for real, but it's a genuinely touching, heartfelt show that really will teach children valuable lessons about this misunderstood condition.

Welcome To Tourettaville’s story is about Mark Brayne (Evan Davies) a young boy who begins to display odd behavior, including twitching, blinking, screaming, and uncontrollable cursing. His family and teachers don't understand why he's doing all of this, until he's diagnosed with Tourette. Mark eventually learns to accept his Tourette in a dream sequence where he makes friends with a trio of aliens named Tick, Blinky, and Screamer; the audience also learns a valuable lesson about accepting people for their differences, at the same time.

The small cast features a couple of actual kids, making it especially accessible to children. The grown-ups (including Broadway talent) do a bang-up job, with Paul Bacon really standing out as the assorted authority figures, including a pedantic school administrator, and a Freudian psychologist.

Welcome To Tourettaville tends to hit kids with lessons they've probably already heard countless times (the things that make Elmo different make Elmo special too!) but, Tourette Syndrome certainly deserves a little extra emphasis here (Big Bird probably never mentioned that the kid screaming obscenities in math class might be doing so because of a neurological disorder). Tourettaville is also quite short, not even half an hour, which makes it too skimpy for an afternoon’s entertainment, but it certain would fit into a school assembly (which appears to be the writers' intention, anyway).

One of the things that makes Welcome To Tourettaville so earnest is the fact that one of its writers has Tourette Syndrome. Johnny Ospa has obviously poured his heart into this show so that he can help future generations of Tourette sufferers, and that shows in the material. Tourettaville is obviously a must-see for families who have a child with Tourette Syndrome, but it’s also a fun way to remind kids that it’s OK to be different.

For those who are excited at the prospect of Lisa Kron's play Well revolutionizing Broadway with its hip, post-modern aesthetic, I have just three words to say: Monty Python's Spamalot.

Yes, friends, it's been done before, and by the most commerical juggernaut around. Intentional breaking of the fourth wall? Check. Sly parody of slightly cheesy and/or self-important theatre forms? Check. Pretense that the show has broken down and they don't know how to end it? Check. Actors walking off the set? Ok, that was in the movie, but... check.

My point here is not that Well isn't entertaining or that Well isn't, in places, very smart; only that it is what is is. And what it is, from where I sit, is, disturbingly, smug: when the show-surrounding-the-show starts to "fall apart," one of the actors announces that this is "some kind of downtown bullshit," reinforcing the stereotype that off-off-Broadway is by nature amateurish, pretentious drivel. Kron, whose roots—nay, whose entire career up to this moment—are solidly off-off-Broadway, ought to know better.

What's ironic is that Well is, at least ostensibly, about the complicated process of integration. The play, Kron tells us at the top of the show, reading from a 3x5 index card with mock-seriousness, is "a multicharacter theatrical exploration of issues of health and illness both in the individual and in a community." It's about wellness, in other words: how integrating the forces and energies of your mind and body can keep you healthy; how integrating people of diverse races, religions, ethnicities, etc. within a neighborhood can make society more healthy. Kron illustrates the former point with contrasting stories of her mother, Ann, and herself: Ann, she tells us, has been sick all her life, while Lisa was sick but, thanks to embracing an appropriately liberating lifestyle, is now well.

The latter notion is demonstrated by Ann's genuinely inspiring and noble work in Lansing, Michigan, where she spearheaded a long-term grassroots effort to bring racial diversity to her neighborhood, working hard to truly build community from the ground up, involving blacks and whites in a variety of activities that helped bring about a common sense of purpose and belonging.

It's interesting stuff, though it doesn't actually get much stage time. In fact, one of the flaws of Well, I think, is how peremptorily the racial integration material is treated. Kron gives equal time to both sides of the wellness debate she instigates in her show, letting her mother and several other characters explain to us that some people really are authentically sick and healthy people can't really understand their suffering, and then showing us by her own example that sometimes mind over matter works—that one can choose not to be sick. But the African Americans in Kron's show don't get a similar chance to speak for themselves; instead, in a weird reverse-guilt-trip thing, the most persistent representation of a person of color in the show—for which Kron apologizes over and over—is a nasty, ignorant nine-year-old black girl taunting little Lisa at elementary school.

Kron tells us that this character isn't supposed to be in her play, but of course that's ingenuous nonsense: every single thing that happens in Well, no matter how convincingly the actors argue to the contrary, has been meticulously planned. Which brings me to the question of what this piece is really about. Well is not a theatrical discourse on wellness and integration; nor is it the self-involved woman vs. mother confrontation that Kron has layered on top of her alleged "multicharacter theatrical exploration." (I should explain clearly here that the principal theatrical device employed in Well is that the actress Jayne Houdyshell plays Ann Kron, offering commentary on Lisa's "show" from a purported replica of the real Ann Kron's living room that covers half of the stage.) No, Well seems to me to be a deconstruction of self-involved "avant-garde" theatre, one that ends, intriguingly, with an implicit attack on issue-oriented art:

LISA: I worked really hard on this. It took me a really long time to figure out how to make all the parts of this fit together and make it work.
JAYNE: But it doesn't work.
LISA: It does work. It was working! They were completely with us.
JAYNE: I know. But it was too easy.
LISA: No, it's not. The play is asking really hard questions.
JAYNE: I think they're the wrong questions....Questions like that are very seductive, because it would be so much easier if we could answer them. But we can't. You can't answer them.

(Jayne then proceeds to provide...well...the answer.)

Houdyshell, by the way, is wondrous as Ann (and, briefly, as "herself"); if there's a Tony Award for Most Lovable Characterization, she's got a major lock on it. But to return to my point, even if we accept that the meta-meta-theatrics of Kron's play work (and I don't believe that they consistently do: there's a scene, for example where the "actors" say goodbye to "Ann," as if they'll never see her again; but surely they will, tomorrow, at the next performance, right?), I still don't get what actual form Kron is deconstructing; and I certainly don't agree that she should "Uncle Tom" her downtown roots in order to do it. In other words: where's the actual self-conscious one-woman show with cheap, cheesy scenery and amateurish actors that Well purports to send up? I guess I've seen a couple of sets fall apart on stage, but that almost always has been a function of budget, a problem that this Broadway show with an $86.25 top ought not to have.

So I left Well confused and annoyed. I am very happy that Lisa Kron has made it to Broadway, and I enjoyed many parts of her show, which is without a doubt entertaining and fun and occasionally even thought-provoking. But for all its alleged avant-garde gyrations, Well is as mainstream as any of its midtown neighbors, especially in its eager willingness to look down its nose at its former compadres downtown. Which isn't bad; it's just true.

This production of What Makes Sammy Run?—billed as a "world premiere" of a new version of the 1964 musical—clearly represents a labor of love for its director, adaptor, and principal instigator, Robert Armin. In a program note and a curtain speech, he tells us that he first saw this show in summer stock nearly 40 years ago, with Frank Gorshin in the title role, and that he's been eager to put the show back on the stage ever since. His efforts include not just remounting what he saw but an attempt at "fixing" it; I've read various reviews and other contemporaneous accounts of the original show and they differ on what made Sammy not run. How has Armin fared at his possibly quixotic task?

To answer that question, I'll begin with a summary of the story, which is based on Budd Schulberg's 1941 novel of the same title (Schulberg wrote the original book for the musical with his brother Stuart). It's about a guy named Sammy Glick (né Glickstein), a hustler with naked and seemingly limitless ambition. We meet him first as a copy boy working at the fictional tabloid "The New York Record," where he's sort-of taken under the wing of drama critic Al Manheim. When Sammy "helps out" Al by going directly to the managing editor to make a correction to one of Al's pieces, he starts to show his true colors; he also gets the boss's attention and very soon Sammy has a column of his own, usurping some of Al's turf. Sammy's rise is rapid: he steals a story idea for a movie from another journalist, talks his way into selling it to super-agent Myron Selznick, and in short order he's in Hollywood, on the payroll as a screenwriter at a major studio. He wastes no time in wooing Kit Sargent, a famous writer who's also working at this studio (she falls for him in spite of herself), as well as Sidney Fineman, head of production.

By the end of Act One, Sammy has become a producer in his own right, and is beginning a potentially very lucrative relationship with Laurette Harrington, the spoiled and headstrong daughter of the studio's main backer. Act Two brings him close to achieving his dreams, as he finds a way to topple Fineman and wed Laurette. When it's disclosed at the eleventh hour that Fineman has committed suicide and that Laurette has a taste for the ladies herself, it appears that Sammy may at last have gotten his comeuppance. But the final song, entitled "Some Days Everything Goes Wrong," ends with the line "most days everything goes right"—Sammy is indomitable and undefeatable to the end.

Sammy Glick is a fairly unlikable central character for a musical, but this is by no means an insurmountable difficulty, as shows as varied as Carousel, Pal Joey, and Sweeney Todd have proven. The problem with What Makes Sammy Run?—and I think this is pretty fundamental—is that neither the book nor the score really allow us to get to know him. We don't need to love the guy, but we ought to understand what makes him tick (see title); Armin's new book and Drake's augmented score (there are four new songs in this revival, and some original material has been altered and/or removed) don't provide much information for us to work with. There are the briefest of allusions to Sammy's impoverished Lower East Side past (a few lyrics in his first song, "A New Pair of Shoes" plus a very quick visit from his brother Izzy), and except for these there's really nothing that explains what started Sammy running in the first place. As for his technique, well, we see him in action from time to time, but the songs Drake has written to show us Sammy at his slickest are generally pleasant but generic pop tunes. The show's big hit number, for example, is called "A Room Without Windows"—what does that mean? Why would Sammy want to take his love interest to a room with that particular attribute? It feels random and unenlightening.

With only a sketchily defined title character at its core, What Makes Sammy Run?'s real protagonist turns out to be Al Manheim, who in this version is relentlessly nice (if occasionally naive where Sammy is concerned); even though he's hard to care about because he's so bland, it is Al who gets the big second act ballad ("Something to Live For") and who, indeed, goes off into the sunset with the girl (Kit) at the final curtain.

Mankiller Laurette has very little to do; a budding starlet named Billie Rand gets the show's sexiest number, "The Friendliest Thing," in a scene with Al that pretty much shuts the story down cold. (Paradoxically, as performed by Jessica Luck, it's the most effective number in the production; this song was assigned to Laurette in the original version.)

Running some three hours, this new What Makes Sammy Run? is a long, hard sit. Occasional attempts at humor (notably the musical number "Lights! Camera! Platitude!," the big Act One show-stopper) fall flat, usually because they're so dated.

Armin's staging is nevertheless pretty miraculous given its Equity showcase code budget; sketchy scenic effects define the locales quite effectively, and there are plenty of appropriate period costumes on hand, designed by Joanne Haas. Jack Dyville's choreography is fairly minimal, but Armin's blocking works well on the small West End Theatre stage.

The ensemble, though, is uneven. Carl Anthony Tramon seems badly miscast as Sammy, never demonstrating the smooth suavity and charm that gets the character where he goes, or the insatiable drive that fuels his brazen acts. Both Larry Daggett (Al) and Moira Stone (Kit) have lovely singing voices, but their characters are really hard to care about; Kristin McLaughlin sinks her teeth into Laurette, but as noted above, she hasn't very far to go. Jeffrey Farber (Fineman), Steven Patterson (Harrington), and Selby Brown and Matthew Napoli (each in a variety of roles) acquit themselves well. But Darron Cardosa and Jessica Luck both overdo the schlemiel bit as, respectively, the geeky journalist who becomes Sammy's ghostwriter and Sammy's girlfriend from the old neighborhood.

As the many series of concert-style revivals of musicals (Encores!, Musicals Tonight!, Musicals in Mufti, etc.) attest, we live in a time of endless re-creation. That makes for great history, but not always great art. I really do think I understand Armin's impulse here—there's more than one beloved show from my youth that I'd love to see gussied up and given it's proper due at long last. But shows flop for a reason. Maybe, instead of wondering how to make Sammy finally run, it would be better to devote attention to something new.

Rinne Groff’s newest play, What Then, is likely to get her nominated for membership in the Great Playwrights Who Turn Out The Occasional Clunker Club. Not that there’s any shame in that. Any club whose ranks include Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and even Shakespeare is one that most people would want to belong to. And based on the strength of the two plays of hers that I’ve seen previously, The Ruby Sunrise and Jimmy Carter Was a Democrat, Groff is on her way to becoming a dramatist of such stature. But her current offering is liable to test the patience of anyone hoping for more of the compelling profundity and showmanship that defined both of those works.

Set in an unnamed city in a post-apocalyptic future, What Then centers on the household of Diane and Tom. Diane has quit her job as an accountant to start a new career as an architect. The only problem with this transition is that Diane is only an architect when she’s asleep and dreaming. Her husband, Tom, works for a big international corporation that may be responsible for much of their city’s current environmental distress. His daughter, Sallie, is a recovering drug addict (or is she?) who will stop at nothing to get herself approved for an apartment in a respectable housing complex. And then there’s a mysterious and charismatic figure who goes by the name of either Bahktiyor or Tom (depending on whom you ask), and who may be Sallie’s boyfriend, Diane’s landscape architect, or Tom’s drug dealer (also depending on whom you ask).

Groff’s political consciousness is front and center in What Then (she previously tackled government union-busting in Jimmy Carter, and corporate America’s growing interference with artistic content in The Ruby Sunrise). This time she turns her attention to the environment, and puts forth a clear and simple message: we must take better care of our environment if we want to have a planet to live on. But Groff’s means of conveying her message are ineffective. What Then is written in fanciful and surreal fashion, relying less on traditional linear narrative and more on symbolism. Tomatoes, canoli, blood, and Tom’s mysterious briefcase are all recurring symbolic motifs. But we never find out what they mean. It’s also unclear how much of the play takes place in reality, and how much takes place in Diane’s dreams. Is the housing complex she’s building while asleep coming to fruition in reality? (How fun would that be?) This uncertainty may be intentional on Groff’s part, but it doesn’t serve or clarify anything. There’s also the matter of specifying exactly what’s happened to the world outside. We know it’s not good, but by remaining vague about it, Groff prevents What Then from anchoring itself to any tangible context that the audience can grab onto.

(It should be mentioned that all of What Then’s disparate elements could make for an interesting play with the proper shaping and clarification. As it stands right now, though, Groff’s ideas feel only half-formed—and, at a running time of almost two hours, about 45 minutes too long. For a play that lacks answers and makes the audience work so hard for the few it provides—and doesn’t have an intermission—this borders on unforgivable.)

All of this confusion seems to confound director Hal Brooks, as well. He is never able to make thematic heads-or-tails of What Then, even though he, set designer Jo Winiarski, and lighting designer Kirk Bookman come up with some lovely visuals on stage. The saving grace of this production is the acting. The four-person cast—Andrew Dolan, Meg MacCary, Piter Marek, and Merritt Wever—pump What Then full of whatever life it has. Wever’s take on the apathetic and scheming Sallie is authentic without being exaggerated. MacCary and Marek strike similar chords as Diane and Bahktiyor/Tom; their scenes together crackle with seductive possibilities. And Dolan is excellent as Tom. His big scene, in which he gets increasingly high on painkillers, is almost worth the price of admission alone.

Alas, the actors alone are not enough to make What Then a fulfilling evening of theatre. Groff is a talented writer, and has earned the right to misstep here. Here’s hoping that she gives us a full taste of her power and skill the next time out.

If you were a space alien with an assignment to discover what human females discuss with each other when human males are not around, you could go see What Women Talk About at the Kraine Theatre and be thoroughly entertained by four actresses with knockout talent and comic timing. You could also deliver a report that what women mostly discuss are men, sex, and clothes.

Since the audience, at least the night I saw it, was made up solely of Earthlings totally enjoying the show, it was understood that these are four women out of millions who just happen to be talking about these particular subjects and little else. The entirely unscripted performance clocks in at just a few minutes over an hour and is a continuing story. You have to attend the next show to find out what happens. This means there is time for further character development.

And, on this particular night, the given circumstance for the improv was the wedding day of Sara, a twentysomething woman with a past drug habit and ambivalent feelings about her marriage. It makes sense that what to wear, past relationships, and the wedding night would be topics of conversation.

Her friend Bonnie, a married casting director whom she has known since high school, has taken charge of planning the wedding, down to having lunches with Sara's fiancé and future mother-in-law. Joining her and Sara in the bridal suite for a pre-wedding celebration is Sophie, a college friend to them both and a photographer in the midst of a divorce. Jean, Sophie's childhood friend but new to the group, is the last arrival. She is a single education coordinator and it is not clear at this point whether Sophie may have romantic feelings for her. All of these situations are interesting enough to continue and grow in future plot lines.

The whole cast is superb as individuals and as an ensemble: each actress comes on from the beginning with a total persona that sets her apart from the rest and that makes for dynamic interactions and conflict. Lauren Seikaly (Bonnie) plays the one who seems to have it all together. Her crisp physical actions and acting choices show her to be a person who needs to be in charge. Lynne Rosenberg (Jean) is hysterically funny. Her intelligence shines through her dry delivery and Dorothy Parkeresque wit. Brenna Palughi (Sophie) has some of the best comic timing around. Sophie says terribly nasty things to her friends, but Palughi is also versatile enough to endow her character with complexity and surprises the audience with moments of genuine thoughtfulness and empathy. Katherine Heller (Sara) is not only quick-witted in her verbal reactions, she (along with the others) is incredibly generous on stage in terms of listening and setting up reactions that make the funny lines of the others land.

Although I at first thought, "Why is this so important that it's titled What Women Talk About, as if it's all that women talk about? It's only a fraction of what I talk to my friends about. Why can't they talk about sports or science? Why should we only be interested in what young, attractive, Caucasian women talk about, and that's only if they are talking about guys?"—the cast really won me over with their full and humane performances. I admitted to myself that if I had brought a girlfriend along to the show, among the many things we would talk about afterwards would be where Seikaly found those awesome silver strappy high-heeled shoes.

What’s Your Problem?, playing at the 3rd Annual Fresh Fruit Festival, is a new musical revue cheerfully focusing on gay culture, while making light of life, love and relationships in general. It starts off with a successful tongue-in-cheek prologue about exposing the private problems each audience member hides by singing about the troubles onstage in front of all. The good-natured warning makes clear that no problem is safe from the inevitable ridicule and clever lyrics of the show.

Lyricist Hector Coris and composer Paul L. Johnson, two long-time collaborators, have created a well-built musical revue. The lyrics truly impress: they’re intelligent, witty, and at the same time scan extraordinary well with the music. For example, “There’s a Pansy in the Garden” is a humorous ditty about a group of neighbors and their resentment towards a gay English man in their garden. The unassuming target of resentment incorrectly believes his neighbors are complaining about an actual pansy flower planted somewhere in the garden, which he tries to find to no avail. The evening continues with fun tunes of a gay man’s excitement of finding a date among the myriad of sailors during “Fleet Week,” a gay couple’s indecisive ballad of whether to marry or continue in gay bachelordom in “If We Were Gay-Married,” and a young woman’s self-help recognition that being single can only end by expanding her selection in “Lowering My Standards.”

In terms of production values, it’s a simple and scaled-down offering. The lighting design and staging are basic, not artistic, and the costumes appear to be clothing pulled from the actors’ own closets. There is no set, not that there needs to be one necessarily, but the barren look of this production is especially noticeable given the lack of dramatic staging or any measure of choreography. Coris and Johnson should consider collaborating with a theatrical director for a future mounting of this project. For instance, a director could have told him that the actors backstage were completely visible to the audience many times during the show at moments when they shouldn’t have been seen. The backstage shuffling is distracting, taking attention away from an otherwise mellifluous tune on stage.

Throughout the evening, Coris is a charming master of ceremonies, as he narrates an occasional anecdote about a song’s history or tells a joke as a segue. His cabaret experience is apparent, and he has enough charismatic stage quality to do a one-man show.

The other featured actors are Travis Bloom, Matthew Myers, and Dawn Trautman. Myers is a spectacular singer, and the strongest performer of this ensemble. His stirring rendition of “Find It In Your Heart”, a comical and wishful song about an enemy finding sharp objects like a blade in his heart, is unforgettable. It’s a song of revenge which Myers performs with vocal mastery and deserves the biggest applause. Bloom and Trautman are uneven singing individually, but fare well in group harmony.

Overall, this musical is fun-seeking, entertaining, and droll at times, though perhaps slightly overpriced at $20 for the evening.

Two different medieval British chroniclers, William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall, tell the same strange tale of an event that occurred in the Suffolk town of St. Mary Woolpit in a time of civil war. During the harvest, two strange children, with green skin and speaking an alien language, suddenly appeared out of an ancient pit. Taken in by a local soldier, they gradually learned to speak English, learned to eat bread and meat and other English foodstuffs, and lost the green color to their skin. When asked of their origins, they would reply, “We are people of the land of Saint Martin.”

From the ten mysterious paragraphs of history that tell this story, playwright Glyn Maxwell has crafted a strange and unsettling play, both a realistic history play and an eerie folk tale.

The play’s four acts each represent a season in St. Mary Woolpit, beginning in summer, with a collection of village peasants working in the fields, supervised by the local reeve, Whityard: Tom Parch, always looking for a way out of work; Ned and Sara Staner, a recently married couple whose union is already beginning to show cracks; and Bethan Coley, the town belle. The first section works a little too hard, I think, at establishing the relationships among these people and the historical setting, but the play rapidly picks up energy and intrigue once the green children appear out of the wolfpit. Nicole Raphael as the Green Girl and Margo Passalaqua as the Green Boy seem remarkably alien in every way—covered in green body paint, babbling in an incomprehensible tongue, moving sinuously and intertwining their bodies in a way that makes them seem almost like one creature with far too many limbs.

The town splits rapidly in its reactions to the children, with everyone seeing an angle for him- or herself. Tom Parch thinks there’s money to be made, and the not-very-bright Ned Staner is willing to go along. Ned’s wife, Sara, sees the chance to ingratiate herself with Master Richard Calne, the local property owner and sometime soldier (though no one’s entirely sure which side he’s fighting on), by offering herself as teacher and nursemaid to the children. And both Calne and Whityard find themselves uneasily fascinated by the girl, seeing her as both an angel and a forbidden object of lust who works her way into their dreams.

These tensions continue to work themselves out throughout the play, as the girl (named Adela by Richard Calne) slowly begins to adapt, losing the green color of her skin and learning to speak English. Her brother, now named John, remains far more alien, refusing all food but fresh beans, rejecting all English words except “stone,” and remaining wary of the villagers. Calne has the children baptized and then is ordered by Deazil, the local parson, to keep them hidden away, out of sight of any other representatives of the Church. The complicated interweaving of lust, greed, and religion comes to a head on New Year’s Eve, when Parch’s latest money-making scheme requires prostituting an unwitting Adela.

Maxwell is most astute in his portrayal of the gender issues and relationships in this milieu, touching on rape, prostitution, uneasy marriage, unfulfilled lust and sexual jealousy, the entwining of money and sex, and the age-old virgin/whore dichotomy, without ever seeming didactic. He is aided in this by a mesmerizing performance by Nicole Raphael as Adela, who simultaneously conveys the evolution of Adela into an ordinary English housemaid and her inherent otherworldliness; she remains always both angel and demon, child and woman, normal and alien. And because she is never quite one thing or the other, the audience is also constantly unsettled in a provocative way—horrified by Calne’s obvious attraction to this little girl, but also seeing the sexuality in her; angry when this innocent is mistreated but also seeing a cool calculation in her.

The production overall is solid but not outstanding; I found Robert Hupp’s staging a little flat and some of the performances tend toward melodrama. In addition to Raphael, excellent work is done by Craig Smith, who gives Parch the wry humor of a Shakespearean clown. But the most striking aspect of the play is the Green Girl; it is her inherent strangeness, her refreshing ambiguity, that keep the play lingering in my mind.

The first few minutes of Work: A Madcap Tragi-Parody of Corporate America will feel like sweet revenge to anyone who’s ever held a menial office job. The droning, meaningless jargon; the petty squabbles with people you’d never interact with by choice; the weird intermingling of sex and power; the fierceness with which the pecking order is constructed and defended—all are deftly parodied and exaggerated into violent farce by playwright Charlotte Meehan. The writing is crisp and Meehan clearly has a good ear for buzzwords. But after the first few minutes, I started wanting more from it than a shock of pleasurable recognition, and it never delivered. There are small pleasures and sharp observations floating through Work, but they’re not embedded in a compelling whole.

The setting is a corporate office, where social and occupational hierarchies are equally clearly delineated. Firmly at the bottom of both is Hope Less, a combative depressive whose offensive body odor brings complaints from the two others at her level. These two, Mary Ann and Barry Honey, are much more interested in moving up in the world—Mary Ann through competence, and Barry Honey through bootlicking (literally, at one point). Above them is Mackerel MM, a bullying middle manager; above Mackerel is Michael UM, efficient and officious; above him is Laura L. Boss, overtly relishing the perks of her power. Above them all is a mysterious voice from above, which periodically barks orders.

And then—there’s a shakeup in the powers that be. In the wake of a scandal that seems to be both sexual and financial, Laura L. Boss gets demoted, the entire staff must undergo sensitivity training (or more precisely “sensitivity to productivity” training), and Hope Less stages a somewhat improbable coup. The general trend is of an ordered world slipping into anarchy, but there’s not a clear cause-and-effect relationship between the transgressions shown or described and the chaos that results. There is violence, bloodshed, and an abortive attempt at cannibalism (both metaphorical and literal).

What’s missing is any kind of investment, in either the unfolding of the narrative or the characters. Granted, one of Meehan’s points is the inhuman or inhumane nature of the corporate world—note the generic character names—but she’s gone so far in that direction that there are no humans in the play. The characters feel schematic, like points on an infrastructure chart. Again, I know that’s partly the point, but I think that in trying to illustrate the soulless nature of the corporation, Meehan has—intentionally or otherwise—written a soulless play. There’s nothing in either character or story that makes me care about the outcome, which means the play fails at both engaging an audience emotionally and at providing commentary that hits home in a meaningful way.

This gives the actors some serious challenges. They relish the language, but ultimately they’re handicapped by the blankness of their characters. Kerry-Jayne Wilson as Laura L. Boss and Adeel Akhtar as Michael UM are the most successful at filling in the blanks and making their characters feel motivated in some way.

The production is simple but very stylish. Director Jim Simpson’s staging uses a wide, shallow space with a number of odd entrances and windows to great advantage. He creates a playing plane right in the audience’s face, one that feels almost two-dimensional at times. The constant appearance and disappearance of actors through a plethora of doors reinforces the looming paranoia, as does Greg Duffin’s echo-filled sound design. Joe Novak’s lighting, heavy on flickering fluorescents, and Melissa Schlachtmeyer’s costumes, an elegant set of variations on the gray flannel suit, create the office ambience without the need for a set.

Work succeeds at reminding us of the dark underbelly of corporate America. But it fails to place these reminders in a coherent whole whose impact lasts beyond leaving the theater.

The sheer size, scope, and ambition of Ian W. Hill's vision in World Gone Wrong dazzles and boggles. Who does this guy think he is, putting a 2-part, 34-scene, 21-actor epic blend of film noir and contemporary political commentary onto the tiny Brick Theater stage? Well, if you're a fan of Hill's work (as I have been for nearly a decade now), then you know that he is PRECISELY the guy to do this. A true master of the experimental and the economical, Hill relies on spectacularly committed artists (such as: everyone in his cast, costume/makeup/hair consultant Yvonne Roen, and technical director Berit Johnson) and his own unwavering and brilliant vision to create theatre that delights and challenges and jolts even as it prods and pokes at its audience. The Moral Values Festival has at least one bona fide smash hit on its hands.

World Gone Wrong—which is actually just the title of Part One of this extravaganza, the second being "Worth Gun Willed"—tells the story of a private eye named William Mist who is trying to solve the mystery of who killed him. The weapon is a slow-acting poison and so he has some time to try to uncover the bad guy (or gal); and if that runs out, his dedicated partner Ned Daley isn't going to rest until the crime is properly avenged. The story unfolds in flashbacks inside flashbacks, with facts about Mist and the gritty denizens of a vintage pulpy New York/Los Angeles underworld uncovered a few at a time until the whole dastardly scenario is out in the open.

Every word of World Gone Wrong comes from someplace else. A fascinating program note tells us that almost all of the play's lines come from some 200 films, mostly classic film noirs of the '40s and '50s—you'll recognize some of them, like D.O.A. and Sunset Boulevard and The Killers and The Maltese Falcon. The fun, though, comes not from trying to identify the source material—the words fly past too quickly for that—but rather from hearing the heightened and overdone foolishness of this simile- and metaphor- laden prose, so neatly juxtaposed and concentrated: there are sections that are laugh-out-loud hilarious, the way that the first episodes of Twin Peaks were. Interspersed, often startlingly, are more current quotations from the likes of Donald Rumsfield and President George W. Bush. Hill's idea, I think, is to contrast the amoral surface/moral center of the noir genre with the moral platitudes/amoral center of today's political power establishment. It's jarring, if a shade subtle: I found myself almost wanting the thing to slow down so I could catch up with the ideas as they zoomed past.

Which is not to say that World Gone Wrong is hard to follow; far from it. The recognizable types are actually paraded in front of us in the play's stylish prologue, and because the evocations are so pitch-perfect in terms of visuals and attitude, we can peg them right away: the busybody drunk, the cheap dive waitress, the gangster's moll, the maniacal henchman, and so on. The actors lip-synch to their own pre-recorded voices as they recite their lines, pulled out of their original contexts and rearranged here to tell Hill's new, gripping tale. This is a lot harder than you might expect, and the cast members mostly pull it off with tremendous aplomb. Standouts include Fred Backus as the drunk, Josephine Cashman as the waitress, Maggie Cino as the moll, Debbie Troche as what the program describes as a faded spitfire, Bryan Enk and Josh Mertz as two of the goons, and Adam Swiderski and Hill himself as Daly and Mist. Ultimately form and content collide and then reinforce one another, creating a theatrical experience as dense as it is unique.

World Gone Wrong is part of an ongoing series called "Necropolis" that Hill has been working on since 2000. I will not miss any future installments. Meantime, catch this one.

It’s funny, short, a little corny, and a little magical. Best of all, it takes place in a beautiful public garden on 104th Street just west of Central Park, full of tall green plants, trees, herbs, and flowers.

You Can Fish All You Want, But the Sea Always Wins in the End is a free show written by Brian P.J. Cronin and directed by Arthur Aulisi. Although the show is written primarily for children, some of its wit is there for the adults in the audience. It is a tale about telling a tall tale, the tall tale being about a ten-year-old boy who goes on an underwater adventure with a gang of turtles and a whale after his grandfather is arrested and made to work at an aquarium. On his adventure, he finds out more than he ever knew about the deep ocean, teaches a sad whale he’s not alone in the world, and gets to dance with a jellyfish. The show also, at one point, asks for participation from some very willing children.

Throughout the play, the actors move throughout the garden and the audience follows them to different locations. Matt Borgmeyer plays music on the mandolin to accompany the action. Borgmeyer’s music is warm and uplifting and fits with the mood of the play very well.

The costumes, designed by Becky Lasky, are whimsical and creative. I loved the turtles in loose-fitting dresses with bright shells. I loved the whale’s horn and the giant squid. Nick Turner as the Whale and Marshall York as the Cop/Young Fernando stood out among this very lively and talented cast.

It’s so easy to find theatre that almost hits the mark. There’s so much out there that comes close to examining an issue or giving life to an idea or challenging an audience to think. With each near-success, our standards seem to slip a bit lower. Then along comes a show that accomplishes everything it sets out to do. It pushes, but not too hard. It’s cohesive, but allows room for interpretation. It holds something up to the light for examination, but is in no way gratuitous; it never invites the audience to gawk at the human train-wreck that is occurring. With Zarathustra Said Some Things, No?, the Bridge Theatre Company has presented a story that is as even-handed as it is challenging, and in doing so they have created an amazing piece of theatre.

On the surface, Zarathustra is the story of a Canadian couple in Paris who have made a suicide pact that they have, so far, failed to complete. The longer we watch, the more unsettling their relationship becomes to us. The games they play (both actual and metaphorical) begin as confusing and odd but rapidly become disturbing. Their mock group therapy game includes record-keeping, points claimed, lost, and conceded. It is not only effective satire but also a painful vision of two people who are utterly lost. They have all but stopped fighting against the tide and have simply allowed themselves to be overtaken by their convoluted pathologies.

The brilliance of the writing is in the timing. Playwright Trevor Ferguson does a remarkable job of carefully and steadily revealing the reasons why this couple is so dysfunctional and neurotic. With each revelation, Ferguson forces the audience to re-examine their initial perceptions of who these two characters are and why they behave as they do. Ferguson’s text is extremely demanding of the actors. That said, its rapid shifts in emotional state and the complexity of the characters’ pathologies are well-paced but not over-explained. He has created an intense and insightful examination of addiction and abuse, and he clearly demonstrates that nothing exists in a vacuum. In the end, Ferguson has illuminated the dark corners of this couple’s world, but the text of the play has so many layers of metaphor, it can easily stand up to multiple viewings.

Lina Roessler and Brett Watson are astonishingly powerful in these roles. This is no play for faint-of-heart actors. The characters’ sadistic pathologies, as individuals and as a couple, require brave and honest performances. Mishandled, this play could easily become little more than a sick spectator sport. Roessler and Watson both do a marvelous job of giving full, three-dimensional life to these bruised and battered human beings. In one scene, Roessler forces Watson down on all fours and eventually rides him like a pony. It would be ridiculous if not for the actors’ heartbreakingly human performance. They elevate the moment to a metaphor for how we, as humans, treat one another, and it is painful to watch. They move from pony-riding to Nietzsche to the concept of the event horizon. I lost count of the times I was, quite simply, astounded at their ability to take an over-the-top line or action and create from it a genuine, human moment. The pain they convey is legitimate and believable. One comments to the other “Our light will be extinguished.” To which the other replies, without a hint of humor, “What light?”

Robin A. Paterson’s direction is careful and maintains the delicate balance and pacing necessary for this play to work. He gives the audience carefully placed and isolated moments of humor that allow some comic relief without undermining the seriousness of the play and the characters’ pain. The only shortcoming is due to a single, poor set design choice. The audience has to watch much of the action through and around two welded metal doors, the French doors of the balcony from which our couple intends to jump. While Paterson uses the framework of the door for some wonderful stage pictures (the actors looking out at us, each of them isolated in a box), it generally just gets in the way. It’s a clever idea that doesn’t quite work. The doors should be moved to the side, although that would kill the dominance that they have (and deserve).

However, Paterson takes full advantage of the rest of Katka Hubacek’s outstanding set design. Other than the doors, the set is a study in how to use a small space. The scrim-like rear window is eerie and allows for some interesting lighting effects. The stained skylight, the askew rug, the painted metal bed frame, and a host of other details make this set feel like an old Paris flat. They also speak volumes about the two people who live in this space. The design elements all work together quite well. Michael Picton’s sound design sets the tone from the very beginning with accordion music and the hollow echoes of children’s voices; he incorporates traffic noise when the doors are open. Paterson’s lighting design also blends well, lighting the space effectively and creating an amazing sunset aura as the play comes to an end.

While no theatre company gets it right every time (especially if they’re willing to take risks), this young company seems to have found their niche. They excel at finding new work that is fresh and vital. They’re willing to take necessary risks without losing sight of their audiences’ needs and perceptions. If you're looking for a solid, young theatre company to follow, The Bridge Theatre Company merits serious consideration.

The first incarnation of the charismatic arch-villain Zastrozzi came from Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1810 in the famed Romance poet’s first published novel. Canadian playwright George F. Walker apparently never read the novel, only a description in a biography of Shelley, so his contemporary play Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline can’t really be called an adaptation. It’s a verbose play—Zastrozzi’s existential soliloquies seem to go on forever—but otherwise a darkly fun, perversely smart piece of very theatrical theatre, and I can see where it could gain cult status, if it has not already. It also presents interesting technical challenges to mount, and this production from The 7th Sign now at the ArcLight Theater gives it a most commendable shot, although not always successful.

Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline is a mean-spirited social satire about moral and spiritual accountability. It’s a cornucopia of the Grand Guignol, of operatic emotional extremes to the point of camp, gratuitous swordfights, and references to kinky, violent sex with rape as titillation (one woman even threatens to rape another woman). It’s trashy and exploitative, but intelligently philosophical and has very pretty language—a lot like most of what Shakespeare wrote, but more accessible to 21st century sensibilities. The story almost doesn’t matter; it’s about obsession. As Zastrozzi pontificates to the followers who look to him for their lives’ validation, “Life is a series of totally arbitrary and often meaningless events.”

Zastrozzi is a 19th-century world-class master criminal, murderer, robber, rapist, and zealous atheist whose greatest conceit is that he has never been caught. In the last few years, however, his new fixation has become revenge, of finding and killing a man named Verezzi who horribly murdered Zastrozzi’s mother. Verezzi seems always to mysteriously elude Zastrozzi and his two minions, the murderous but unimaginative Bernardo, and Matilda, Zastrozzi’s sultry, sociopathic mistress. Then we meet Verezzi, a man apparently so traumatized by his own crime of passion that his descent into madness has left him an overgrown baby with an adult libido and a delusion that he is a Messiah with a host of spiritual followers. He’s a complete idiot, albeit a beatifically happy one. His survival is due only to the resourcefulness of his harried servant, Victor, a symmetry obsessed ex-priest who once promised Verezzi’s father to protect him and now somehow manages to stay one step ahead of Zastrozzi. But Zastrozzi finally tracks clueless Verezzi to a small European mountain hamlet where they both fall madly in love with the beautiful and pure but pragmatic Julia. Then the fun really begins and the body count rises.

The 7th Sign’s production, directed by Adam Parrish, is technically very good-looking. The simple but elegant set, designed by Brian Cote, is comprised of steps that look like they are made of stone, and a giant window as the backdrop gives the feeling of being in an ancient fortress. The period costumes by Katja Andreiev are just, just beautiful.

The actors, most of them recent NYU Tisch School of the Arts grads and just a bit too young to truly make the most of this sophisticated play, are, nonetheless, also gorgeous and distinctive-looking, especially Danny Deferrari as a Rasputin-like Zastrozzi and Orion Taraban as the ghoul Bernardo. My favorite performances come from Matt Harrington as wise, tormented “ordinary man” Victor, and Elliotte Crowell as innocent but shrewd Julia. Both play characters written less over-the-top, perhaps, than the others, and manage to be more grounded and real against the obvious caricatures. Handsome, baby-faced Charlie Wilson quite looks the part of harmless, pathetically confused Verezzi, but he isn’t given much more to do here apart from bounce around like a puppy grown too large for his kennel. Emily Stern is certainly dangerously beautiful as evil maneater Matilda, and her voice is low and sexy. Yet, many of her lines tended to be delivered in a Lauren Bacall-esque monotone, and I sometimes struggled to hear her.

Unfortunately, what really keeps this production from transcending to the level it deserves to be at are the fights' staging and the sex scenes. The moments of erotic passion are, shall we say, less than committed in intensity. The swordfights themselves are nicely choreographed by KC Stage, but there are far too many of them, and they go on far too long. Ah, well, boys with long, sharp, pointy objects will, of course, be boys. A noticeable problem, though, comes in the staging when characters must drop and die, or when one character slugs or stabs another. When, for instance, Zastrozzi kills someone after a lengthy swordfight, his downstage victim (almost on top of the audience) is very visibly breathing with exertion after being pronounced stone cold dead. Similarly, when another character gets slapped or punched in the face, the strike is distractingly fake. Finally, there’s the issue of blood. All those bodies on the floor at the end—throats slit, digestive organs gouged out—and there’s no blood or, at least, a few entrails? This is no time to be dainty!

Still, on the whole, I was entertained by Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline, and I consider that The 7th Sign offered me a respectable first introduction to the intriguing work of George F. Walker. It will be interesting to see what other outré works this young, ambitious company chooses to tackle next.